Kipling wrote some 250 short stories. He published them in all sorts of contemporary newspapers and journals throughout his long career, and it was his practice to bring them together into collections published every few years. These collections form milestones through his oeuvre.

It was also his habit to prefix or follow each story with a short poem commenting directly or obliquely on the narratives they decorate – a habit he picked up, apparently, from a favourite author, Ralph Waldo Emerson and took to new heights of complex interaction and subtle commentary.

This 1904 collection takes its name from The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation of Richard Hakluyt (c. 1552-1616), a compendium of exciting Elizabethan sailing expeditions. Traffics and Discoveries includes:

The Captive (1902) – This starts as a third-person account of a journalist (obviously Kipling) visiting a Boer prisoner of war camp during the Boer War (1899 to 1902). As so often the opening scene setting is vivid and powerful. Wandering among the men he gets talking to one, an American – Laughton O. Zigler from Akron, Ohio – who gives a long rambling first-person account of how he brought across the Atlantic a field gun and ammunition of his own design to sell to the Boers and ended up getting involved with one of their commandos, led by Adrian Van Zyl, helping them fight in the field against the British, until they were all captured.

Kipling characteristically stuffs the text with his technical know-how about artillery pieces, about the ‘hopper-feed and recoil-cylinder’, trying to out-man and out-engineer the reader, which isn’t very difficult. Zigler’s tone, his description of the sporadic artillery encounters with the Brits, is very casual; it’s hard not to find Zigler’s joking about ‘laying out’ the British boys with his gun, offensive.

‘They [the Boers] fought to kill, and, by what I could make out, the British fought to be killed. So both parties were accommodated.’

The war is seen as a comradely adventure between ‘friends’ and all the British officers Zigler meets admit to being ‘a bit pro-Boer’. (Is this how combatants saw the Boer War? Or is it the sentimental self-serving view of a privileged observer?) From Zigler’s account both sides spend half the time trying to kill each other and the other half being polite and complimentary. Often the combatants had actually met socially, dined and gossiped: now they are trying to kill each other.

The second half of the ‘story’ describes the dinner the British General and officers give for Zigler and Van Zyl, once they are prisoners, during which they compare notes like professionals. The British General is mighty lofty and complacent, hoping the war will go on another five years, so that he can knock his ragtag collection of floorworkers and stevedores into a professional army. Nothing is mentioned of the rank incompetence and idiocy which made the Boer War such a shambles for the British. (See The Boer War by Thomas Pakenham.) And a ghost walks over the text when the General boomingly declares:

‘It’s a first-class dress-parade for Armageddon.’

Yes, far more so than anyone knew. These are the kind of heartless pro-war sentiments for which Kipling would later be crucified.

As well as satirising the amateur, jolly-good-chap attitude of the British officers, using Zigler, an American, as a mouthpiece, means Kipling can also be sarcastic about the British political class, all couched in Zigler’s down-home terminology:

‘Well, you’ve an effete aristocracy running yours, and we’ve a crowd of politicians. The results are practically identical.’

‘I tell you, Sir, there’s not much of anything the matter with the Royal British Artillery. They’re brainy men languishing under an effete system which, when you take good holt of it, is England…’

The Captive is of a piece with Kipling’s other ‘warning’ poems and stories, warning that only eternal vigilance could keep Britain safe from her ever-present enemies, and lamenting the failure of peacetime politicians to pay enough heed, to take war seriously and to prosecute it whole-heartedly.

• Kipling society notes

The Bonds of Discipline (1903) – Inspired by reading a book by a Frenchman who stowed away on a Royal Navy ship, the narrator travels to Portsmouth where he asks a publican to rustle up any sailors from the ship in question. He is introduced to Emanuel Pyecroft, second-class petty-officer, who serves on the very same ship and happened to be present when the French author of the book was caught masquerading as a Portuguese stowaway. He explains that the captain of the ship quickly realised the so-called Portuguese was in fact a french spy, and so proceeded to put on a lot of preposterous ship-board behaviour (including a mock execution) to rag and mislead him.

If The Captive allowed Kipling to showcase his knowledge of artillery, this story is a prolonged exercise in Kipling showing off his knowledge of naval speech rhythms, slang and technical gubbins aboard ship. The entire thing is told through the voice of Pyecroft which – like the voices of the three soldiers back in his Plain Tales period, or the rural dialect of his later Sussex period, is excruciatingly difficult to follow:

‘“When it comes to “Down ‘ammicks!” which is our naval way o’ goin’ to bye-bye, I took particular trouble over Antonio, ‘oo had ‘is ‘ammick ‘ove at ’im with general instructions to sling it an’ be sugared. In the ensuin’ melly I pioneered him to the after-‘atch, which is a orifice communicatin’ with the after-flat an’ similar suites of apartments. He havin’ navigated at three fifths power immejit ahead o’ me, I wasn’t goin’ to volunteer any assistance, nor he didn’t need it.’
“‘Mong Jew!’ says ‘e, sniffin’ round. An’ twice more ‘Mong Jew!’— which is pure French. Then he slings ‘is ‘ammick, nips in, an’ coils down. ‘Not bad for a Portugee conscript,’ I says to myself, casts off the tow, abandons him, and reports to ‘Op.

Like most of Kipling’s stories told by ‘characters’ in their slang and accents, it is almost unreadable (cf The Wish House). Kipling comes over as immensely pleased with himself and the bumptious diction of his music hall marine, revelling in his self-congratulatory facetiousness:

“In the balmy dawnin’ it was given out, all among the ‘olystones, by our sub-lootenant, who was a three-way-discharge devil, that all orders after eight bells was to be executed in inverse ration to the cube o’ the velocity. ‘The reg’lar routine,’ he says, ‘was arrogated for reasons o’ state an’ policy, an’ any flat-foot who presumed to exhibit surprise, annoyance, or amusement, would be slightly but firmly reproached.’

The ‘story’, as much as you can disentangle it from all this verbiage, is that the whole crew realised the Frenchie was a spy and so put on all manner of extravagant performances of incompetence and disobedience in order to mislead him, leading up to a faked execution by firing squad of a sailor. All of which is dutifully reported in the Frenchman’s book, which is the one the narrator was reading in the opening lines. Conclusions: Silly gullible French.

This is the first of six Pyecroft stories devoted to showcasing Kipling’s knowledge of naval matters and carry his booming calls for naval re-armament.

• Kipling Society notes on The Bonds of Discipline
• Kipling Society notes on the Pyecroft stories

A Sahibs’ War (1901) – Umr Singh is a Sikh in the British Army who is in South Africa during the Boer War and has been tasked with going to ‘Eshtellenbosch’ to collect horses. The text is entirely his monologue to a Sahib who helps him get a ticket for the right train, in which he a) shows off his knowledge of Indian customs, religion, traditions and service in the Indian Army b) laments the British setbacks in the Boer War due to their being too courteous and considerate of the Boer guerrillas.

The Sikh thinks it silly of the British not to have used the Indian Army to put down the Boers, silly and subversive, for if the Brits fail in South Africa other colonies will take note of their weakness. That is the view of Umr’s ‘sahib’, his former master, Captain Corbyn or ‘Kurban Sahib’.

But privately to me Kurban Sahib said we should have loosed the Sikhs and the Gurkhas on these people till they came in with their foreheads in the dust.

The reason the Indian Army was forbidden to be involved is that it is a White Man’s war – white British against white Dutch. The actual African inhabitants of South Africa are hardly mentioned except insofar as they spark Umr’s own prejudices – he is not happy, when he arrives in Africa, to be given command of a load of ‘niggers’ – Kaffirs, who are ‘filth unspeakable’.

But the core of the story is how Umr and his Sahib, Captain Corbyn both volunteered to take ‘sick leave’ from their Indian regiment to come and fight the Boers – the kind of higher loyalty to the Empire and the Law which Kipling admires. They attach themselves to a regiment of Australians for whom Kipling has boundless admiration. In the central episode they are all tricked by the Boers inhabiting an ‘innocent’, ‘peaceful’ farmhouse, who are in fact organising an ambush of them all, a sudden fusillade of rifle shots, in which Corbyn is killed and Umr only just escapes.

In a rage Umr and the Muslim servant Sikandar Khan who they have picked up in their travels, go back to the farmhouse to take revenge, beheading one of the wounded Boers inside it and seizing the mentally sub-normal son of the householders to hang him in a nearby tree as punishment, as revenge on the treacherous farmer-priest and his wife.

But here – the irrational and uncanny in Kipling shows itself, as so often – for in the middle of this brutal wartime anecdote, the ghost of Kurban Sahib appears to Umr and three times forbids him from hanging the boy, ‘for it is a Sahibs’ war’.

This latter part of the text, the account of the ambush and then the narrator’s revenge, is vivid and powerful, and the appearance of the Sahib’s ghost eerie – it has a real imaginative force – Kipling’s daemon pushing through. But it is embedded in a text which overflows with contempt, hatred, resentment, is marinated in multiple types of racial prejudice, and is continually teetering on the edge of, not just violence but sadistic violence, vengeful hateful violence.

This is all epitomised in the last few lines of the text when Umr returns to the site of his Sahib’s death and rejoices to find, not only a memorial carved by the loyal and dutiful Australians – but that the Boer farmhouse, the well, the water tank, the barn and fruit trees – all have been razed from the face of the earth, by the ‘manly’ Australians, who aren’t shackled by the British concern for ‘fair play’.

The narrator rejoices, Kipling rejoices, and the reader is meant to rejoice in this act of nihilistic vengeance – the kind of scorched earth policy which will characterise so much of 20th century history.

• Kipling Society notes

‘Their Lawful Occasions’ The narrator (pretty obviously Kipling) is invited to go down to Weymouth to go aboard ship and witness Royal Navy manoeuvres; but in the town he bumps into his old mucker, Emanuel Pyecroft (who we met in The Bonds of Discipline). Very like Mulvaney, one of the Three Soldiers, Pyecroft has a cheeky and facetious sense of humour with which he explains that his ship, 267, is being mocked up by its captain to look like a destroyer so it can steam out and take part in the naval wargames starting that night. The whole thing is told in a tone of forced humour and all the characters speak with elaborate facetiousness.

A thin cough ran up the speaking-tube.
“Well, what is it, Mr. Hinchcliffe?” said Moorshed.
“I merely wished to report that she is still continuin’ to go, Sir.”
“Right-O! Can we whack her up to fifteen, d’you think?”
“I’ll try, Sir; but we’d prefer to have the engine-room hatch open — at first, Sir.”
Whacked up then she was, and for half an hour was careered largely through the night, turning at last with a suddenness that slung us across the narrow deck.

With Kipling, you often have the feeling that a huge amount of effort, imagination and humour has been wasted on ‘stories’ which no way justify them. Here, for example, is our hero describing what a torpedo boat sounds like if you’re trying to get to sleep on it.

‘Sleepin’ in a torpedo-boat’s what you might call an acquired habit.”
I coiled down on an iron-hard horse-hair pillow next the quivering steel wall to acquire that habit. The sea, sliding over 267’s skin, worried me with importunate, half-caught confidences. It drummed tackily to gather my attention, coughed, spat, cleared its throat, and, on the eve of that portentous communication, retired up stage as a multitude whispering. Anon, I caught the tramp of armies afoot, the hum of crowded cities awaiting the event, the single sob of a woman, and dry roaring of wild beasts. A dropped shovel clanging on the stokehold floor was, naturally enough, the unbarring of arena gates; our sucking uplift across the crest of some little swell, nothing less than the haling forth of new worlds; our half-turning descent into the hollow of its mate, the abysmal plunge of God-forgotten planets. Through all these phenomena and more — though I ran with wild horses over illimitable plains of rustling grass; though I crouched belly-flat under appalling fires of musketry; though I was Livingstone, painless, and incurious in the grip of his lion — my shut eyes saw the lamp swinging in its gimbals, the irregularly gliding patch of light on the steel ladder, and every elastic shadow in the corners of the frail angle-irons; while my body strove to accommodate itself to the infernal vibration of the machine. At the last I rolled limply on the floor, and woke to real life with a bruised nose and a great call to go on deck at once.

Vivid, as are the descriptions of the ship and of the sea, the English Channel, in its changing lights – all excellent, down to the presentation of tiny and convincing details.

Presently a hand-bellows foghorn jarred like a corncrake, and there rattled out of the mist a big ship literally above us. We could count the rivets in her plates as we scrooped by, and the little drops of dew gathered below them.

But there is little or no plot to speak of and what there is is very hard to make out. Only slowly did I realise that the ‘267’ is going under cover so it can ‘bag’ the destroyers in the war games; i.e. it is joining the flotilla masquerading as another ship and then will sail close enough to the other ships to – I think – mark them with some kind of paint, indicating that it is an ‘enemy’ ship and has ‘destroyed’ them as part of the war games.

In practice this amounts to dialogue-overheavy larks in the Channel fog and dark, as the captain and crew dodge and weave between the vast destroyers on manoeuvres.

Kipling was thrashed and beaten as a boy at his miserable foster home in Portsmouth and then at public school. It is difficult to read a story like this and not see it as the troubled adult who emerged from this hellish childhood fantasising about being accepted on their own terms by manly men – one of the team, one of the crew, manfully shaking hands, drinking strong liquor and eyes shining with troubles and challenges shared and overcome.

The manliness, the obsession with technical detail and the brusque, obscure way in which it’s conveyed, can be read as all part of the bookish, short-sighted wimp’s massive over-compensation, his adoration of Real Men.

Hence also, maybe, the excessive anger and vengefulness, the addiction to kicking the weak and vulnerable, which disfigures so many of his stories.

The Comprehension of Private Copper (1902) – A Boer guerrilla captures Private Alf Copper who had strayed unwisely far from his platoon and into the bush. The Boer descants at length about how his father, a Transvaal shop-keeper, was deceived out of his livelihood by the British, along with numerous insults of the British fighting ability or the morale of the poor Tommy far from home.

But in saying all this the Boer gets just a bit too close to Alf Copper, who lays him out with one well-aimed punch. Hah! Decadent, demoralised Tomy, is he! that’ll show ‘im! Kipling couldn’t be more frothingly on the side of the British Army and against the treacherous deceiving Boers.

More propaganda follows when Alf gets his now-captive Boer captive back to his picket, where his mates are looking over a British Liberal paper which is blackening their names back home. One of the Tommies satirically quotes it:

‘You’re the uneducated ‘ireling of a callous aristocracy which ‘as sold itself to the ‘Ebrew financier. Meantime, Ducky”— he ran his finger down a column of assorted paragraphs —“you’re slakin’ your brutal instincks in furious excesses. Shriekin’ women an’ desolated ‘omesteads is what you enjoy, Alf . . ., Halloa! What’s a smokin’ ‘ektacomb?’

The general idea is that both the arrogant Boer and the treacherous Liberals back home think the British Tommy doesn’t know what he’s fighting for and is a poor, badly educated pawn – but oh yes he does and oh no he isn’t! The text sets out to humiliate the arrogant Boer and ridicule whining anti-Imperial Liberals.

Steam Tactics (1902) – Third of the six Pyecroft stories, in which the narrator – while driving in his new-fangled steam motor car – meets him and Hinchcliffe, the naval engineer, on leave in sunny Sussex. Taking the idea that there are all kinds of angers and revenges going on in Kipling’s mind and texts, stories like this provide plenty of examples of the way this anger operates not only at the level of storyline and character (arrogant Boer, stupid Liberals, dogged Tommy, in the stories above). It might also explain the deliberate, wilful and aggressive obscurity of individual paragraphs and sentences. For example:

A bluish and silent beast of the true old sheep-dog breed glided from behind an outhouse and without words fell to work.

It is impossible from reading this to know what is going on; only the succeeding sentence makes it clear:

Pyecroft kept him at bay with a rake-handle while our party, in rallying-square, retired along the box-bordered brick-path to the car.

So ‘fell to work’ means the dog began barking and menacing them. Ah. In individual paragraphs, in sequences, and across entire stories, Kipling deliberately keeps things from the reader. Why? In a spirit of Modernist elitism and allusion? No. In order to beat the reader, to ‘best’ the reader. To be the winner, yah boo sucks.

This enjoyment of physical humiliation is present from the first few lines, where the narrator takes typically brutal pleasure in driving up behind the dawdling horse-drawn postal carrier and using his loud steam hooter to scare the horse so badly that it bolts into the hedgerow, scattering parcels all over the road. Ha ha ha, yah boo sucks. Kipling thinks this is hilarious. The reader thinks he’s a bully.

The ‘story’ only finally arrives after pages and pages of Pyecroft’s ship’s engineer, Hinchcliffe, and the narrator’s own chauffeur and mechanic poring over the steam car’s entrails to show us Kipling’s detailed technical knowledge.

The ‘story’ amounts to the car being pulled over by a man who pretends to be a special constable who will fine them for exceeding the speed limit. But Kipling, Pyecroft and Hinchcliffe suspect he is an imposter and con man. So they invite him into the car and immediately strong-arm and threaten and humiliate him. They’re discussing whether to strip him of his boots or just hang him, when another jalopy turns up, driven by Kipling’s friend Kysh, and they fall to discussing how the authorities have got it in for the poor motorist (the kind of aggressive self-pity which and aggrieved victimhood which all motorists still enjoy to this day).

Instead they drive in Kysh’s vast powerful petrol-fuelled Octopod across Sussex, then off the road into a private park all to deliberately maroon the poor policeman in an early version of a safari park, among bemused kangaroos in a rich man’s private game park. Yah boo sucks to all traffic police.

• Kipling Society notes

“Wireless” (1902) – An eerie supernatural story in which Kipling is invited to the local chemist’s shop where the tubercular chemist, Mr Shaynor, is allowing a young friend, Mr Cashell, to set up very early radio antenna and equipment to receive a signal from Poole.

But wile the engineer is fussing over his equipment a completely different signal comes through: for the young chemist is in love with a local girl called Fanny but he is tubercular and coughing blood. He dozes off in a corner then suddenly wakes and, in a kind of trance, starta to scribble verses which Kipling realises exactly match The Eve of St Agnes, a long poem by the Romantic poet John Keats. And now the narrator realises that Keats himself was a chemist’s assistant, he had tuberculosis, he also was in love with a young woman named Fanny. The narrator has a weird out of body moment as he realises that– maybe the chemist is channeling the spirit of the long-dead poet!

For an instant, that was half an eternity, the shop spun before me in a rainbow-tinted whirl, in and through which my own soul most dispassionately considered my own soul as that fought with an over-mastering fear.

Weird and uncanny, like most of Kipling’s many supernatural stories. (And always a relief that nobody gets beaten or humiliated.)

• Kipling Society notes

The Army of a Dream (1904) – the narrator falls asleep in his club and has a long and obscure dream in which he meets old military men who live in a parallel universe, in a society designed and run to create an unbeatable amry, a society in which they recruit and train men much earlier and better, in fact starting as early as six. Having had the new system explained to him in theory, the narrator goes to watch men practising with arms in the vast parade ground in central London, realising that passersby and lookers-on admire and envy the British Army – unlike the mockery and condescension it suffers in actual Victorian society.

In other words, this long fantasia stems from Kipling’s anger at the incompetent amateurishness of the British Army during the Boer War.

Kipling’s stories often teeter on the edge of having no plot: this one falls over the edge into being a kind of fictionalised pamphlet, advocating a recipe for the militarisation of society in a way familiar to students of Prussian society or Nazi Germany. And what could be more stirring than marching in shiny uniform through an adoring public.

I rejoiced to the marrow of my bones thus to be borne along on billows of surging music among magnificent men, in sunlight, through a crowded town whose people, I could feel, regarded us with comradeship, affection — and more.

As a rule of thumb, the more dialogue in a Kipling story the more incomprehensible it will be, as he exercises his unfailing enthusiasm to do funny voices at the reader’s expense.

“I was roped in the other day as an Adjustment Committee by the Kemptown Board School. I was riding under the Brighton racecourse, and I heard the whistle goin’ for umpire — the regulation, two longs and two shorts. I didn’t take any notice till an infant about a yard high jumped up from a furze-patch and shouted: ‘Guard! Guard! Come ’ere! I want you perfessionally. Alf says ‘e ain’t outflanked. Ain’t ‘e a liar? Come an’ look ‘ow I’ve posted my men.’ You bet I looked. The young demon trotted by my stirrup and showed me his whole army (twenty of ’em) laid out under cover as nicely as you please round a cowhouse in a hollow. He kept on shouting: ‘I’ve drew Alf into there. ‘Is persition ain’t tenable. Say it ain’t tenable, Guard!’ I rode round the position, and Alf with his army came out of his cowhouse an’ sat on the roof and protested like a — like a Militia Colonel; but the facts were in favour of my friend and I umpired according. Well, Alf abode by my decision. I explained it to him at length, and he solemnly paid up his head-money — farthing points if you please.”

The most telling moment of this long, long text comes in the last paragraph where the narrator suddenly sees all the bright young officers who have been showing him round the dream army, dining and bantering and chaffing – he sees them all dead or expiring on the dusty veldt of South Africa. A characteristically brutal and bitter and angry symbol of the price of the Army, and society’s, rank incompetence.

It is characteristic of Kipling’s impact in the real world of active men, that the following year he had this ‘story’ – really a prospectus for the organisation of a conscript army – printed as a six-penny pamphlet ‘as there have been numerous requests from adjutants of volunteers etc. to get it to their companies’. (Rudyard Kipling: His life and Work by Charles Carrington, Penguin edition, page 469)

“They” (1904) The unnamed narrator is driving his car round Sussex when he comes across a mysteriously beautiful and quiet country house, where he spies children playing amid the landscaped gardens, before meeting the owner, an elegant beautiful woman who is quite blind. It takes several visits and repeated hints from the remote butler, before the penny drops, and the narrator realises that the elusive children are ghosts – a realisation passed to him when one of the children kisses his palm in a way he realises, with a jolt, only his dead daughter did. A major feature of Kipling’s fiction is its tendency to be clipped and elliptical. Thus nowhere in the story does it say it was the kiss of the narrator’s child; I only learned this crucial fact from the Kipling Society website’s excellent notes on the story.

Atmosphere and description he does excellently well. Here is the narrator in his car:

As I reached the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A laden collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water and, across copper-coloured haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an eddy of sudden wind drummed through sheltered oaks, and spun aloft the first day sample of autumn leaves. When I reached the beach road the sea-fog fumed over the brickfields, and the tide was telling all the groins of the gale beyond Ushant. In less than an hour summer England vanished in chill grey. We were again the shut island of the North, all the ships of the world bellowing at our perilous gates; and between their outcries ran the piping of bewildered gulls. My cap dripped moisture, the folds of the rug held it in pools or sluiced it away in runnels, and the salt-rime stuck to my lips.

Mrs. Bathurst (1904) Fourth of the stories about Petty Officer Emanuel Pyecroft. As with all Kipling’s stories told in dialogue it is difficult to follow and hard to care.

“Moon — Moon! Now where did I last . . .? Oh yes, when I was in the Palladium! I met Quigley at Buncrana Station. He told me Moon ‘ad run when the Astrild sloop was cruising among the South Seas three years back. He always showed signs o’ bein’ a Mormonastic beggar. Yes, he slipped off quietly an’ they ‘adn’t time to chase ’im round the islands even if the navigatin’ officer ‘ad been equal to the job.”
“Wasn’t he?” said Hooper.
“Not so. Accordin’ to Quigley the Astrild spent half her commission rompin’ up the beach like a she-turtle, an’ the other half hatching turtles’ eggs on the top o’ numerous reefs. When she was docked at Sydney her copper looked like Aunt Maria’s washing on the line — an’ her ‘midship frames was sprung. The commander swore the dockyard ‘ad done it haulin’ the pore thing on to the slips. They do do strange things at sea, Mr. Hooper.”

The narrator meets old friend Hooper, a railway official, at Simon’s Town, the naval base in South Africa. They’re enjoying a beer in a carriage near the beach when up comes none other than Pyecroft accompanied by a burly marine, Sergeant Pritchard, a Royal Marine.

As in so many Kipling stories they get to yarning and gossiping about people we’ve never heard of and don’t care about – to establish the mood – and this takes up a good half of the text, before they get round to discussing a particular tale. This concerns a man they know who deserted for the sake of a woman, a Mrs Bathurst, a widow who kept a bar in Auckland. He was Vickery, fifteen years in the service and just 18 months short of his pension, hopelessly smitten by the loyal Mrs B.

Eerie aspects:

1. Vickery has four false teeth in his lower left jaw. They don’t fit very well, hence his nickname ‘Clicks’. This is the kind of detail Kipling does well.

2. Vickery sees Mrs B in a very early cinematograph film shot at Paddington station and being shown as part of a travelling circus in the Cape. He insists on taking Pyecroft to it five nights in a row just to watch 45 seconds of Mrs B walking jerkily and silently towards the camera. This is one of the first mentions of a cinematoscope in fiction and typical of Kipling’s interest in gadgets and technology.

3. Hooper has been listening hard all this time, and asks whether Vickery had a tattoo before revealing that, as part of his work, he had to investigate the case of two corpses found burnt to carbon in a densely wooded part of the rail system in the interior – and one of them had a tattoo like Pyecroft describes, and four false teeth!

Victorian culture prevented any mention of sex or sexual attraction. Maybe what makes stories like this so unfulfilling is that Vickery clearly had some kind of burning obsession for Mrs Bathurst – but whatever its true nature, the repressed obsessiveness of it comes out in the bizarreness of the details of the text, which are almost like symptoms in a case study by Freud.

Below the Mill Dam (1904) – One of Kipling’s ‘objects and animals speaking’ stories. The mill is, of course, as old as he Doomsday book and the Mill Wheel talks, so do the Waters, and the Grey Cat and the Black Rat which inhabit it.

The joke is that they speak in ever-so-posh phraseology, presumably mocking the English upper classes.

The plot seems to be that the humans have rigged up a dynamo to the mill wheel which, towards the end of the story, they switch on and which floods the mill house with new-fangled electric light, much to all the inhuman characters’ amazement!

And the twist is that the Spirit of the Mill adapts wonderfully fast to the new electric turbines and all its advantages. Within a page or so it has taken the new-fangled technology in its stride and is telling the animals all about the benefits of electricity, for example illuminating the barn where cows can now calve at night etc.

It is powerfully done – but imagining animals and machinery talking isn’t really a story.

*****

Kipling and le Carré

In his aggressive public school facetiousness, Kipling reminds me exactly of the laboured humour of John le Carré:

After a great meal we poured libations and made burnt-offerings in honour of Kysh, who received our homage graciously.

I conceived great respect for Apothecaries’ Hall, and esteem for Mr. Cashell, a zealous craftsman who magnified his calling.

This is exactly the kind of pompous-sounding phraseology which mars so much of le Carré’s prose, as detailed in any of my reviews of his novels. Either the self-congratulatory and elaborately facetious lingo of the public school environment was remarkably consistent from the 1870s to the 1930s (when le Carré attended boarding school) or there’s a more direct influence of Kipling the Imperial propagandist on the twentieth century’s greatest spy writer. Would be interesting to know if a study has been made on the subject…

Related links

• Traffics and Discoveries online

Other Kipling reviews

• Strange Tales (2006)
• The Best Short Stories (1997)
• Rudyard Kipling: Selected Poetry edited by Craig Raine (1992)
• War Stories and Poems (1990)
• Rudyard Kipling: Selected Verse edited by James Cochrane (1977)
• Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Art by Charles Carrington (1955)
• Charles Carrington on Kipling’s verse (1955)
• A Choice of Kipling’s Verse by T.S. Eliot (1941)

• Something of Myself (1937)
• Limits and Renewals (1932)
• The Muse Among the Motors (1904-1929)
• Debits and Credits (1926)
• A Diversity of Creatures (1917)
• Rewards and Fairies (1910)
• Actions and Reactions (1909)
• Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906)
• Traffics and Discoveries (1904)
• Just So stories (1902)
• Kim (1901)
• The Absent-Minded Beggar (1899)
• Stalky and Co (1899)
• The Day’s Work (1898)
• Captains Courageous (1897)
• The Seven Seas (1896)
• The Jungle Books (1895, 1895)
• Many Inventions (1893)
• Barrack Room Ballads (1892)
• Life’s Handicap (1891)
• The Light That Failed (1891)
• The Man Who Would Be King and other stories (1888)
• Plain Tales From The Hills (1888)